


Gravitational Theory

by Meatball42



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Grace, Apocalypse Prevented, Defining Human, Existential Angst, Existential Crisis, Existentialism, Gen, God's Plan, Human Castiel, Humanity, Transformation, Watch me write really smart things, deep thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:18:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1262626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Apocalypse doesn’t happen, Castiel loses the last of his Grace, and changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravitational Theory

**Author's Note:**

> So I want to apologize for this in advance, because it's a bit dense, and a bit wacky, and very rambly, but I do hope someone will like it despite these shortcomings. If there's something that doesn't make sense (lol, I'm sure there's lots of stuff here that doesn't make sense), please tell me so I can edit it.
> 
> Actual Author's Note: This story’s final hypothesis has been going around in my head for _quite_ some time, so although originally this was just a weird-ass, 2 am rambling about how my brain won’t shut up when I try to sleep (filtered through fanfiction, as most of my thoughts are, particularly at 2 am), I decided to try and make it _mean_ something. As humans do.

The hardest part about being human is trying to control his thoughts. Something in Sam’s nature allows him to understand this and empathize, but he cannot comprehend the extent of Castiel’s difficulties accommodating his newly-human mind. Dean does not understand at all, and will often refer to the situation as ‘angel schizophrenia,’ which is not at all accurate.

Castiel doesn’t blame them for the shortcoming. They have always been human; to understand the multi-dimensionality of angels when one has only ever experienced four dimensions is not a capability human minds have. The fact that Castiel’s now-human mind does have this capability is part of the problem.

Humans, for the most part, do not decide to think about things. A thought occurs to them, and then another, and another, all intertwined by subject matter, chronology, or some other organizational form. Some human minds do not work like this-- they are less ordered. Thoughts do not need to be related to occur. This can create discomfort in individuals whose biology yearns for consciousness, for continuance, for symmetry.

Castiel can understand the occurrence of unrelated thoughts, thoughts which are not inspired by sensory input or another thought. Angels think on multiple levels of consciousness-- one level is responsible for new thoughts, one for picking though the new thoughts, one for deciding which are worth considering and one for considering them. Other levels are dedicated to the interpretation of multiple senses, to communications, to God.

The level of new thoughts-- inspiration, creativity, creation-- was not often utilized by angels, who were created for the purpose of doing as they were told. The ability to conceive original thoughts was a gift, to be used for simple pleasures and for honoring their Father, not for their own purposes. As a tactician-soldier, who helped plan battle strategy for his garrison, Castiel used this level of conception more than most angels. His position earned him both respect and caution from other angels. After all, the Sin of the Fall was the conception of an opinion opposing their Father.

On Earth, Castiel’s thinking had to change. Far more often than in Heaven he was required to think original thoughts, to create solutions for new problems, to think quickly in response to new stimuli. Several levels of consciousness were stretched and utilized beyond any previous call, and Castiel found his mind changing.

The nights were the strangest. When he was not needed for any work in Heaven or on Earth and the Winchester brothers were sleeping, Castiel would locate his vessel in their motel room and wait. Waiting was not a difficult task for an angel-- Castiel could pick any concept to tangle with, from any of multiple levels of thought. Shunting an idea from one to another, he could consider it from different dimensions, utilizing time, location, personality, phase, at whatever speed he wished. One level could answer a question a dozen ways in a nanosecond. Another could feel around the edges of a thought for hours.

Or, Castiel could choose to think of nothing. This was a decision he made less and less often after his arrival on Earth, as the pleasure of knowing he was doing his duty faded and doubt crept in. The doubt increased as a function of original thought, and on a level of thought reserved for secrets, Castiel thought that perhaps he was close to falling.

It was Dean who pierced this thought, who dragged it from the furthest depths of Castiel’s mind and forced it through the rational parts of him, through the faithful parts, to the level that took the idea and denied that to think, to choose, was to fall. The level of conception declared that Heaven had lied, and Castiel chose the Winchesters.

It was not the fact that he had turned against his brothers and sisters that personally troubled Castiel, nor that some of his siblings were perverting the _raison d’etre_ of every angel. Those worries were very public. It was the pain of that thought tearing through the levels of his mind that hurt him the most. Suddenly, there was a hole straight through the layers of his mind, and thoughts seeped through. New thoughts increased production dramatically. Communication was contaminated and began to alter rational thought. The tear ran perpendicular to everything Castiel had ever known, and the amalgamations of thoughts that it produced, colored by leakage from every level, began to influence his behavior.

Castiel never put a name to this new plane, not once. There was enough evidence to figure it out logically, there were enough hints to intuit the answer, enough people made clear statements that should have clued him in, but somehow, he never recognized it for what it was.

Now, he knows.

Nighttime is when Castiel has the most trouble. Sam and Dean have trained themselves to fall asleep quickly, after a lifetime of needing every second they could get, whenever they could get it. Castiel has no such training, and he does not know how to control the melting pot that is his new brain.

No longer can he chose what to think. Ideas pop into the front of his head without conscious choice, without him knowing where they came from, or sometimes even why. They happen without warning, even when he’s content thinking through a single idea, and he hasn’t figured out how to shove one thought out of the way, somewhere safe where he can come back to it when he’s ready. They run amok, as though they have lives of their own, an infestation of words and memories and images inside of him, and everything, _absolutely everything_ , is connected to _feelings_.

Sleeping is nearly impossible. Mentioning the problem to Sam gets him a concerned look and an suggestion of sleeping pills, which is immediately vetoed by Dean for reasons the older hunter one hundred percent refuses to share and about which he will not budge.

Eventually, weeks of insomnia mean that Castiel is hardly aware of the fireworks of thoughts that explode in his head at all times. Sam finds a solutions: meditation. It seems that the human body has a kill switch-- simply by moderating his body’s position and breathing patterns he can force his brain to quiet. It’s almost like being an angel again, back when he would occupy only a single layer of his mind, one that was empty.

It doesn’t solve the problem of _feelings_ , though.

It took three days as a human for Castiel to identify the products of the tear Dean caused in his angelic mind: _feelings_. Emotion. Angels did not experience such things. They were made to do, not to feel. They could contain wrath, pity, but these were abilities they carried as tools of God, to be used for His work. The only angels Castiel had ever witnesses experiencing emotions were Anna and Gabriel, neither of whom he had desired to emulate. The revelation that he had been experiencing the precursors to _feelings_ for several years is an immense blow to Castiel’s identity.

It doesn’t help in the slightest that he no longer has a dimension of thought on which his identity is stored.

Even with meditation, thinking as a human is difficult. Even simple conversations have so many layers of interpretation: definitions and connotations and derivations of even the simplest words, not even considering slang, facial expressions, body positioning and movement, speech patterns and referential patterns and physical markers of honesty or lies. Analyses which Castiel could perform in a fraction of a second as an angel are now hopelessly beyond him, and that’s before he takes into consideration the extra senses he used to have. It’s no wonder that he will sometimes ‘zone out,’ as Dean and Sam call it, from the simplest interactions, not with so _much_ to consider.

Hunting is easier. The human body, thank the Lord, has another kill-switch: adrenaline. In the midst of a physical fight Castiel’s human mind becomes clearer than glass, focused solely on one thought: win. A logical progression from sensory input, through frame of reference, through conceptualization, to action. The simplicity makes him want to weep.

Needless to say, the Winchesters are truly worried about him. Castiel has heard them talking about psychologists, about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, about whether he’s going crazy. Castiel tries to reassure them that he is making progress, and for the time being, they have not institutionalized him.

He is making progress. The transition from angel to human has been akin to learning to breathe for the first time while upside down in a body of water and traveling very quickly forward through time and space. It has not been smooth, or comfortable, either physically or mentally. But identity is no longer a separate plane to thought, or to feelings, and sometimes, the dimensions will all quiet and consider each other, and lately, Castiel finds that their previous discordance is settling, slowly, into something very nearly human.

The Apocalypse has been averted, for this era, at least, and life for the Winchesters has settled back to something resembling their life before Castiel’s appearance. Demons still roam, monsters still hunt, ghosts still haunt. Hunters are still needed to protect the unknowing masses of humans. Castiel is learning what it means to be human, mortal. As he sees Earth with new eyes, he is learning what it means to be _alive_.

For the first few weeks after the defeated Michael and Lucifer, Castiel felt that the final draining of his Grace was the worst thing that could have happened to him. He experienced migraines from the influx of strange, incomprehensible sensory data. He experienced grief for the loss of his brothers and sisters, for the existence he had known since time began. He sobbed and shouted and tore at the sheets of the bed Sam and Dean would force him back into, whenever his feverish body would try to escape it, barely consulting his conscious mind. For an angel to become a human was a transition that had never occurred before, not in any of the tomes the Winchesters or their friend Bobby searched through, not in any of the songs of Heaven that were rapidly fading from Castiel’s mind. It was painful on every level of Castiel’s existence, and on each of the new dimensions he discovered as he became more aware of his new life.

Now, months after his transformation, Castiel believes that it was what his Father intended for him. Although Castiel spent thousands of years watching humanity, he had not learned a tenth of what he has gleaned from a few months living as one of them. Although he spent thousands of years with clear thoughts, experiencing the bliss of obedience and the satisfaction of fulfilled duty, there was never once the rush of a job well done or the pride of earning Dean’s grin, Sam’s clap on the back. There was never the same joy from seeing the tears of a woman whose child he saved because he didn’t know what it meant to cry from joy. Now he knows that feeling, and to inspire it in others means more to him than anything ever did when he was an angel.

Dean refuses to believe in predestination, and Castiel can understand why. His existence has been manipulated too many times without his knowledge, and too many times it has been for the worse. He has no faith that there is goodness waiting, placed in his path by a loving Creator.

Sam is the one who is willing to stretch the layers of his mind to try to understand Castiel’s world. He is the one who listened at the beginning, when Castiel, flying high on painkillers, rambled about levels of consciousness and the lost realms of his mind, when Dean couldn’t bear to stay. Sam is the one who learned how to call Castiel back when his thoughts were taking him away, who answered seriously every question the former angel asked, from what went into a hotdog to why humans sought love. And Sam, now, is the one who sits back in the small, wooden chair at the motel’s small, wooden table when Castiel says he thinks that angels are meant to become humans.

“Our Father made us the way we were. But after that, He made humans, and He saw that they were superior to us. He told us to worship you.”

Castiel takes a sip of a water bottle Dean had tossed into the backseat for him earlier in the evening. He closes his eyes to savor its taste: plastic from the bottle, warm from the sun that shone through it to the leather of the backseat.

“He told us you watch you. And then He left. I think He was leaving us to learn to think for ourselves.”

“Isn’t that a bit… unrealistic?” Sam replies. “If you _were_ created not to think for yourselves, and I still don’t entirely believe that, by the way, why would God think you would be able to change? Becoming human-- gaining the ability to choose for yourself-- would require the ability to choose for yourself, which was what made you become human.”

“That’s probably why it hurt so much,” Castiel muses. Sam’s face twists at the perceived brushing off of his argument. Castiel feels a burst of affection at that face--- one which he has seen quite often in the last few months of existential discussions with the younger Winchester. The warmth of emotion in his chest is like a message from above-- or wherever God may be-- that his hypothesis is correct.

“I don’t know why it happened,” he admits, because he is getting tired and his discussions with Sam will stretch into the early hours if no one gives ground, “but despite all I’ve lost… I do believe I am where I am meant to be.”

Apparently he was thinking that thought for longer than he had intended, because Sam’s answering smile is accompanied by a hand on his shoulder: Dean has returned.

“Yeah, Cas. You are.”


End file.
